14 DAY TRIAL // With the release of the Linux 4.15 kernel series out the door, it's time to take a look at the contributions made by Collabora's developers during this development cycle.
Linux kernel 4.15 was released yesterday by Linus Torvalds, and it's the first kernel series to come built-in with patches for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities. However, the Linux 4.15 kernel also offers many new features like support for the RISC-V architecture and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization.
In addition, there's also support for the User-Mode Instruction Prevention feature for Intel processors, modesetting support and improves video support for the AMDGPU open-source graphics driver for supported AMD Radeon graphics cards, as well as better power usage for machines with the SATA Link Power Management feature.
Collabora's developers are known for their generous contributions to every new Linux kernel branch, yet this time, probably due to the winter holidays and the massive amount of patches for Meltdown and Spectre exploits, they only managed to contribute nineteen patches, though they also worked on some major patchsets too.
"While the total number of contributions was lower than previous releases (19 patches by 6 different engineers), Collaborans worked on some bigger patchsets that took a longer time to merge, like V4L2 Explicit Synchronization and UTF-8 case insensitive lookups for EXT4," says Gustavo Padovan.
Here's Collabora's contributions to the Linux 4.15 kernel
Among some of the contributions made by Collabora's developers to the Linux 4.15 kernel, we can mention various fixes to the i.MX serial driver and to the DRM buffer modifier for the Gemini Lake core from Intel, as well as the implementation of a DRM asynchronous cursor update to the Freedreno driver through atomic API.
Other than that, they managed to add device tree information for a GE Healthcare device, fix the JACK initialization for an Intel ASoC device, as well as to add more improvements to Rockchip and i.MX devices. For a complete list with all the contributions made by Collabora's devs to Linux kernel 4.15, check out this blog article.